Research On The Effect Of Visual Factors On Annoyance Evaluation Caused By Environmental Noise

As concerns on the living environment grow, the increasingly serious noise pollution has caught more and more attention of people. Related studies have shown that the noise problem can not only affect people's life and work, but also lead to a series of health problems, such as hearing loss, cardiovascular disease and communication disorders. Although the government have developed various noise reduction measures and policies, but noise control technology is far from completely solve the increasingly serious noise problem. With the in-depth study on noise problems, researchers have found that the effect of noise pollution on people not only depends on SPL, loudness and other acoustic properties, but also may be affected by some non-acoustic factors such as visual factors. Therefore, from another perspective, we can reduce the noise annoyance and improve the acoustic environmental comfort through creating a comfortable visual environment.Our research group have studied the effect of color and brightness on road traffic noise annoyance evaluation through laboratory research methods. The experimental results showed that color perception had a very significant impact on the road traffic noise annoyance, and the red can significantly increase annoyance subjective evaluation of subjects. However, the visual stimuli of these studies was using simple color patches, and whether the results can be applied to the reality scene still need further research.In this study, firstly, specific indoor scenes were set to explore the changes of subjective annoyance evaluation caused by road traffic noise(LAeq.20 sec = 35,45,55,65dB) under different visual conditions. Finding out how the scene, color, brightness and sound pressure level influence the noise annoyance evaluation and the interaction between different factors is our research objectives, furthermore, discussing how to create a "quiet" indoor space under high noise environment. Secondly, plenty of questionnaires and subjective evaluation experiment in the laboratory were used to investigate which visual factors has a significant impact on the environmental noise annoyance and in the outdoor environment. The commercial pedestrian street was selected as the outdoor scene for the study and much real visual and audio recordings were recorded to research the effect of visual factors on environmental noise annoyance in the specific outdoor condition. Finally, a theoretical model of the effect of visual factors on the annoyance evaluation caused by environmental noise was established according to the results. Furthermore, some effective visual design recommendations were presented to reduce the annoyance and damage caused by environmental noise.